The next presidential transition starts right now 

Though Election Day 2024 is a full year away, the next presidential transition must begin now. Congress requires this 12 months before an election, and it is right to do so.  

Only with long-term and coordinated planning can the country be ready should a new president be elected next November. Irrespective of who you support, waiting until after the election is just too risky in our volatile world — and what transpired during the last transition in 2020 proved coordination cannot be assumed. 

It wasn’t always like this. 

In the past, there was no requirement that a sitting president running for re-election had to share anything about the country’s affairs with challengers. And after the election, transition planning typically was an informal affair; extended post-election vacations were not uncommon. Warren Harding spent a month after the 1920 election traveling, first to Panama then on to Jamaica before returning home to spend time greeting well-wishers in St. Augustine, Fla. 

This all changed with the passage of the Presidential Transition Act in 1963 — an acknowledgement that the Cold War demanded a seamless transfer of power. Ever since, Congress has further formalized the process of shifting from the outgoing to the incoming administration. It now provides funding — around $10 million in 2020 and likely a little bit more in 2024 — as well as office space and technology. 

That’s why the General Services Administration will be launching the transition by releasing a report that explains the 2024 process along with a bibliography of resources (it already established a website in September). This is a largely bureaucratic step, but an important one for our democracy. It signals to voters that even a president seeking re-election is prepared to leave office. 

In six months, President Biden must make this commitment even clearer by establishing a White House Transition Coordinating Council consisting of senior officials across government as well as an Agency Transition Directors Council. After that, planning speeds up across the government in coordination with major party candidates up until the election. 

Prior to the last election, these procedures had been taken for granted as universally accepted and adhered to. Though the Trump administration complied with the 12- and 6-month planning requirements in 2020, it failed to deliver a thorough and cooperative transition after the election, risking the safety and security of the country. 

Some of what happened during the 2020 presidential transition was reported at the time, but much of the country’s attention was (rightly) drawn to the Stop the Steal conspiracy and the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. In interviews for a book due out early next year, I listened to countless untold stories about the unwillingness of many Trump officials to coordinate with the Biden-Harris transition team. To be sure, this wasn’t universal, and many told me that career officials almost always fulfilled the promise to be open and helpful with the incoming administration. 

Nonetheless, in key areas, like intelligence, defense and budget planning, I heard worrisome evidence that confirmed many Trump officials weren’t ready to help. Meetings were hard to schedule or canceled at the last minute and, when information was shared, it was done begrudgingly. In one meeting, a person from the Biden-Harris transition team recalled a Trump official saying, “you guys are not legitimate so I'm not sharing this information.” Another volunteer for Biden and Harris said, “We were 100 percent locked out of the Office of Management and Budget.” 

Complicating things in 2020 was an executive order signed late in the year by President Trump, dubbed Schedule F, to reclassify thousands of civil servants as political appointees, thereby making them vulnerable to dismissal without recourse. Senior bureaucrats, who’d cooperated with incoming Republican and Democratic transition teams in the past, feared that aiding the Biden-Harris team would end their careers. “People were afraid to help even three days before we took over, because they knew they could be fired at any second,” claimed one person on the Biden-Harris team in an interview.  

Right now, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a transition to a conservative president in 2024, called Project 2025, rests on resurrecting Schedule F, raising major questions about the impact on cooperation, should the think tank get its way. 

Over the next year, voters will decide that. Until those votes are cast, the most reasonable plan for the Biden administration is to fully comply with the federal transition law. Investing the time and resources into a possible transition out of office is the best way to reestablish the democratic principle of a peaceful transition of power.  

Republican candidates should signal their own commitment to this by promising now that they will abide by federal law and also prepare to govern, should they win. And if they don’t, that promise should be just as strong to accept the results of the next election. 

Heath Brown is associate professor at City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, and is the author of the forthcoming book, “Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency.”